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UFC fighter's Michelle Obama smear reveals much about MAGA bigotry
There's a reason she's been a target for so long.
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Last week, following Trump’s drearily garish UFC White House South Lawn event, heavyweight Josh Hokit decided to lower the tone even further.
In a post-fight, in-the-ring interview with a desperately smiling Joe Rogan, Hokit bellowed, “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?” (Watch below if you can stomach it.)
The people gathered around the ring reacted mostly with silence and puzzlement. Dana White, the UFC CEO, subsequently sent out a text message calling the comment “nasty and false.”
Trump, though, did not disavow the remark. Instead, he appears to have smiled.
Given the depth of Trump’s submersion in right-wing derp, he probably knew what many others at the event did not: Hokit’s grotesque slur did not come out of nowhere.
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The right has pushed conspiracy theories claiming that Michelle Obama is trans for over a decade. More, white supremacists and their ilk have degendered and defeminized Black women for hundreds of years, using the claim that Black women aren’t really women as an excuse for humiliating, brutalizing, enslaving, and murdering them.
Even if the disgusting smear is not new, it highlights the ways in which the status, dignity, and rights of marginalized people are intertwined. The attack on trans people is not just an attack on trans people; it is also, and deliberately, an attack on Black women, on women of color, and ultimately on all women, on all Black people, and on the political party which the majority of all those groups call their own.
Some Democrats have wavered in their support for trans people during the Trump presidency. But this kind of smear directed at a Democratic party leader at a White House event should make it abundantly clear that throwing trans people under a wheeled conveyance will inevitably mean allowing said conveyance to run down and decimate large parts of the coalition. We need to fight back for everyone if we are going to fight back for anyone, because it is the right thing to do, and because fascists, in their hate, do not distinguish between us.
History of a smear
The claim that Michelle Obama is trans appears to have started with comedian Joan Rivers in 2014.
Rivers, then 81, sneered following a book signing that then-president Barack Obama was gay. She added that Michelle was “a transgender”. (She used an offensive slur for trans people as well.)
Rivers refused to apologize, claiming that she was actually complimenting Obama since “the most gorgeous women are transgender.” Others on the right, however, understood that misgendering someone is in fact an insult, and they ran with it.
Far right conspiracy theorist and liar Alex Jones boosted the slur on his website InfoWars, claiming that “it’s fair to question everything this administration says.” He added that “every time I look at Michelle or Michael Obama … something doesn’t look right … she’s got shoulders that are wider than a man’s.” (He threw in the obligatory anti-trans slur as well.)
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